Gmail running on Xserves?

Discussion in 'Macintosh Computers' started by rtt2, Sep 10, 2004.

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  1. rtt2, Sep 10, 2004

    rtt2 macrumors newbie

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    All,

    Cringley let slip in his column yesterday that Gmail runs on Xserves.

    The exact quote is "...especially since Gmail, itself, runs on Apple xServe 1u boxes."

    Is this true, or is he simply blowing hot air?

    I always thought that google ran their entire infrastructure on Linux (Debian?) with commodity x86 hardware. Does it make sense for them to be running xserves for gmail? If so, are they using OS X, or a PPC Linux variant, or something more exotic (NetBSD--unlikely, but?)

    Can anyone shed any light? This is the first I've heard of this.
     
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  2. grapes911, Sep 10, 2004

    grapes911 Moderator emeritus

    grapes911

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  3. Mord, Sep 10, 2004

    Mord macrumors G4

    Mord

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    judgeing on the number of servers google has if they ran only xserves apple would almost double there sales
     
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  4. tomf87, Sep 10, 2004

    tomf87 macrumors 65816

    tomf87

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    I read once that Google technicians actually build the servers from parts and they just slide into racks. In addition, they also wrote their own operating system as well so they have total control over their systems.
     
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  5. edesignuk, Sep 11, 2004

    edesignuk Moderator emeritus

    edesignuk

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    Not in a million years would google use XServes. I heard that they use many hundreds (maybe thousands) of cheap, easily replaceable systems that have pretty much complete fault tolerance between them (if one falls over it has no effect on the system). They can just scrap the box and replace with another unit.
     
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